Rohingyas share tales of horror

Rohingya Muslim women lined up to tell reporters of missing husbands, mothers and sons on Saturday, as international media were escorted for the first time to a village in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state affected by violence since October.

“My son is not a terrorist. He was arrested while doing farmwork,” said one young mother, Sarbeda. She had bustled her way— an infant in her arms — through several other women tellingreporters their husbands had been arrested on false grounds.

In November, Myanmar’s Army swept through villages where stateless Rohingya Muslims live in the area of Maungdaw.

Some 75,000 people fled across the nearby border to Bangladesh, according to the United Nations.

UN investigators who interviewed refugees said allegations of gang rape, torture, arson and killings by security forces in the operation were likely crimes against humanity.

Myanmar’s government, led by Nobel laureate Aung San SuuKyi, has denied most of the claims, and is blocking entry to a UN fact-finding mission tasked with looking into the allegations.

The government has also kept independent journalists and human rights monitors out of the area for the past nine months.

This week, the ministry of information escorted more than a dozen foreign and local journalists representing international media to the area under a guard of officers from the paramilitary Border Guard Police The reporters spent nearly two days in Buthidaung, a township in Maungdaw district of Rakhine state, where they were taken to sites of alleged militant activity.